Milestones reached by new optical formats

Both sides of the high definition optical format war are claiming statistical victories in the battle to be the dominant HD video format.

The Blu-ray Disc Association announced on website Daily Tech that Blu-ray was the first to sell a million disks, an achievement that took less than a year. The site also quoted statistics from Home Media Research that claim 70 per cent of the HD movies sold in Q1 2007 were Blu-ray.

Meanwhile the North American HD DVD Promotional Group has announced a breaking of the 100,000 player barrier. This refers just to stand-alone players and doesn’t include PC drives or the Xbox 360 HD DVD player.

Both sides are claiming significant victories. Andy Parsons, Chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association’s U.S. Promotion Committee and VP at Pioneer Electronics, said: “Blu-ray Discs have been outselling HD DVD by more than two to one since the beginning of the year and the gap is steadily widening. It’s exactly what we’ve said all along would happen – the strong support for Blu-ray among movie studio and equipment manufacturers means that consumers have more choices when it comes to players and titles. And they’re choosing Blu-ray by an ever-increasing margin.”

Jodi Sally, vice president of marketing at Toshiba America Consumer Products said “Retailers are showing a significant increase in sales volume this month so far. On Amazon.com, our HD DVD players continue to rank among the top ten best sellers of all DVD players, which says a lot about how consumers relate to price.”